The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
In most any communications network, statistics collection is a very important function. For example, various statistics are collected for billing, performance monitoring, and for other engineering purposes. In certain packet switching systems, statistics are collected on each virtual connection. Counting mechanisms, such as hardware registers and counters, may be used to accumulate these statistics, which may be then collected by one or more collection devices. In known systems, a collection device sequences through each counting mechanism in a round robin fashion. The rate of this collection cycle must greater than the fastest overflow rate of one of the counting mechanisms. Otherwise, data will be lost.
However, the number of connections supported by a packet switching system continues to increase, and the data rate supported by a connection continues to increase. Therefore, the number of statistics which must be collected continue to increase as does the rate at which each statistic must be collected before a data loss occurs because of an overflow condition. In certain systems, too many resources are required for statistics collection, and in certain circumstances, the collection device cannot sequence through the collection cycle fast enough to avoid data loss. Needed are new methods and apparatus for collecting these statistics.